Sparks Fly Over Removal Of Lewitt Artwork

July 13, 1991|By OWEN McNALLY; Courant Staff Writer

Ten tiny peep holes in a conceptual work by Sol LeWitt have ignited a controversy heating up such inflammable issues as freedom of expression, censorship and definitions of pornography -- issues that raged through the art world last year during the battles over the sexually oriented works by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

The Wadsworth Atheneum, which was one of the hosts for the Mapplethorpe exhibition, is again in the center of this latest dispute rooted in sexual images.

The Hartford museum loaned the LeWitt work to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., to be part of the gallery's touring exhibition, "Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography." Muybridge was a 19th century photographer celebrated for his pioneering stop-action studies of people -- often naked men or women -- and animals in motion.

Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., pulled the LeWitt piece out of the exhibition before it opened there June 28, claiming it was "degrading and offensive to women." Officials at the Atheneum and the Addison say they are dumbfounded by Broun's action. The 1964 work has often been exhibited in Hartford and toured from coast-to-coast without drawing even one complaint, they say.

The work is a combination of sculpture and photography, a bleak, black 96-inch-long box that contains 10 peep holes, each of which looks in on the photographic image of a naked woman.

When the viewer moves sequentially from one of the three-eighths-inch-wide aperture to the next, it appears that the naked woman is moving closer and closer.

Broun said she does not object to the nudity. There are a number of images of nudes in the exhibition, including a video depicting nude men and women.

What she finds objectionable are those tiny apertures that she says are reminiscent of peep shows and transform the squinting viewer into a voyeur.

"For me, peering through successive peepholes and focusing increasingly on the pubic region invokes unequivocal references to a degrading pornographic experience," Broun said in a letter to

Jock Reynolds, director of the Addison. Outraged, Reynolds Friday demanded that the exhibition be shut down if the LeWitt is not displayed -- a request that Broun refused.

"There is no legal right to cancel the exhibition, and we fully intend to continue showing it right through Nov. 8," Broun said.

Reynolds said he would be willing to take legal action to get the show shut down but that he still hopes for an amicable solution.

"We've been hearing from many of the artists by phone and fax," Reynolds said, "and they've told us to take their works out of the show as a demonstration of their support for LeWitt and for freedom of expression. We've talked to all the other venues on the tour, and they've all said they have no intention of censoring the work."

One of those venues is the Atheneum, which will host the show in 1993.

Broun has insisted she is not censoring but rather editing. The LeWitt work, she said, doesn't further the exhibition's aim to show the connection between Muybridge's works and contemporary artists.

Taking sharp exception to that claim, Andrea Miller-Keller, the Atheneum's curator of contemporary art, claims the piece deals with time and art, has nothing to do with lewdness and is central to the exhibition's themes.

Broun claims the photos focus on pubic hair. Miller-Keller stresses that the final image is a closeup of the woman's navel, a symbol of birth and womb, the source of creativity and all images.

LeWitt, who is summering in Spoleto, Italy, with his wife, Carol, issued a terse, minimalist statement through the Atheneum. The internationally acclaimed Hartford native said: "The work speaks for itself. Her aim [Broun's focus on the pubic hair] is too low."

Broun has offered to show the LeWitt work in a separate part of the museum where pro and con views of the piece could be spelled out. There would be a note book by the work for viewers to express their opinions.

Rejecting this sort of accommodation, Reynolds said that would be treating the work "as a sideshow or as a pariah."

Patrick McCaughey, director of the Atheneum, challenged Broun on the issue of censorship.

"Nobody can arrogate to themselves, it seems to me, the right to speak for the community in this matter. We have all agreed to live under the rule of law, and it is there and there alone that community standards are embodied," he wrote in a letter to Broun.